Tom Ley

The Knicks are so bad. After getting massacred by the Thunder on Christmas day, the team that won 54 games last year—which, god, how the hell did this team ever win 54 games?—is sitting at 9-19 and reportedly ready to go back to the drawing board. And what's on the drawing board? "Make all the good players come to New York, somehow."

ESPN's Brian Windhorst reports that Knicks management, despite the team being in the midst of a genuinely remarkable crash-and-burn season, are still confident about the future. Because they have a plan:

According to league sources, the Knicks' first prong is to try to attract the Celtics' Rajon Rondo. This idea has been tossed around in various forms for a while now, it's not shocking. But the way the Knicks are hoping to get Rondo is a little unusual.

It's not in free agency in 2015 but later this season or next summer when he comes back from a torn ACL. The Knicks are hoping Rondo will be interested in making a maneuver similar to what Anthony did back in 2011 and eventually try to force a trade to the Knicks, sources said.

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If that fails—and who knows how Rondo will mesh with this Celtics team, it could work well and he could want to stay—the Knicks fully believe they will get one or two of the following in free agency in 2015 when they expect to have large salary-cap space: Kevin Love, LaMarcus Aldridge, Roy Hibbert, Marc Gasol, Tony Parker or Rondo when his contract is up. Under certain circumstances, James himself could be a free agent again that summer.

You kind of have to respect this plan, simply because of how perfectly Knicks-y it is. Hingeing the franchise's hopes on convincing a player who is coming off a catastrophic knee injury and may or may not mesh with the rest of the Knicks roster to force his current team to trade him to New York? It's like the Carmelo Anthony trade and Amar'e Stoudemire signing combined into a single, ridiculous idea.

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And if that doesn't work, they'll just get Kevin Love or Roy Hibbert or LaMarcus Aldridge or the reanimated corpse of Wilt Chamberlain armed with the Infinity Gauntlet to lead the team out of the darkness!

James Dolan's Knicks, for better or worse (usually worse), are always going to be like this, always pinning their hopes to a brighter future that is just one or two harebrained and exceedingly unlikely hypotheticals away from becoming reality. No matter how many times they watch the rock tumble down the hill, they will always be ready to start pushing it once again, convinced that this time, this time, everything is going to go according to plan.